McFate Incorporated Logo

A few weeks ago I got the good news a former colleague and old friend of mine, David J. McFate, was creating a new company and required my design assistance.

Dave is an outdoorsman and Category III Vibration Specialist specializing in assisting people who operate and maintain very large rotating machines like generators and turbines you might see in a dam or wind farm.

After auditioning plenty of fonts, I knew it was Montserrat the instant I saw it. It's really solid and takes me back in time, although its not really an Interwar Gotham, a term I heard Paul Shaw say jokingly on a Lettering tour of Wall Street recently. It comes in nice variety of weights and I love using it on Dave's artwork.

The "Screaming Yellow JEEP" yellow* is simply a Dave thing. Apparently he's had "Screaming Yellow JEEP Yellow" vehicles and accessories all his life.

The yellow "diamonds" and red rule lines (x and y axis lines) reference eZ-Balance, a rotating-machine maintenance software package that Dave utilizes.

Here's Dave describing eZ-Balance on his Facebook page, "you take vibration readings on the machine and then put on a known weight at a known position. The effect of the mass gives you what is known as the "influence coefficient" for the machine. This allows you to calculate a balancing weight, and tells you where to place it. What I find most intriguing about this is that once the influence coefficient is determined, it never changes. You can come back to the same machine ten years later, and unless a blade broke off or there is a physical change for some reason, you can use the same calculation to trim the balance."

* "Screaming Yellow JEEP" yellow: ffff00; Y100%; R100%, G100%, B0%